# Sebastian Gorka British-born son of Hungarian émigrés who went from [[Breitbart News]] to a short, contested stint in Trump's first White House, then to right-wing talk radio and TV, and back to the White House in 2025 as the **senior director for counterterrorism** on the [[National Security Council]]. In May 2026 he rolled out a U.S. counterterrorism strategy that names left-wing movements as a primary domestic threat and leaves out far-right violence — which makes him the official who turned a media-world worldview into federal threat doctrine. ## Hungary Gorka was born in London in 1970, served in a British Army reserve intelligence unit, and moved to Hungary in 1992, where he worked in politics and defense circles and earned his PhD from Corvinus University in Budapest (2007). Two Hungarian episodes follow him: - **Magyar Gárda.** A 2007 video, surfaced in 2017, shows him declaring support for the formation of the Hungarian Guard — the paramilitary wing associated with the far-right Jobbik party, banned by a Hungarian court in 2009 — "despite the personalities involved." - **The Vitéz medal.** He wore the insignia of the Order of Vitéz, awarded to his father for anti-communist resistance, to a Trump inaugural ball in 2017. The order's historic founder was Miklós Horthy, whose government collaborated with Nazi Germany, and a Vitézi Rend faction listed him as a sworn member. Gorka denied taking an oath. Neither episode shows he holds the views of those groups. Both show he moved easily in the milieu where Hungary's nationalist right and its extreme right overlap — the same milieu the vault follows in the [[Hungarian History Hub]]. ## First Trump administration (2017) Gorka joined the White House in January 2017 as a deputy assistant to the president and "strategist," close to [[Steve Bannon]], and became a combative TV defender of the travel ban. He never obtained the security clearance his national-security work required. He left on August 25, 2017, a week after Bannon; he said he resigned, the White House said he "no longer works at the White House." His departure followed [[John Kelly]]'s arrival as chief of staff. Scholars were sharp about his credentials. Georgetown's Daniel Nexon called his dissertation "inept"; Harvard's [[Stephen Walt]] wrote that he "has never published any scholarship of significance" and that his views on Islam were "extreme even by Washington standards." ## Media years (2017–2024) | Years | Platform | |---|---| | 2017–2019 | [[Fox News]] contributor | | 2019–2025 | Host of *America First with Sebastian Gorka* on the [[Salem Media Group]] radio network — see [[Salem Communications Empire]] | | 2021– | *Gorka Reality Check* on [[Newsmax]] | | Apr 2021 | Permanently banned from [[YouTube]] for 2020 election claims | ## Second Trump administration (2025– ) Trump named him in November 2024; he took office on January 20, 2025, as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the NSC (CBS in 2026 describes him as assistant to the president for counterterrorism). **The May 2026 strategy.** On May 6, 2026, Gorka announced the administration's counterterrorism strategy. It centers: - drug cartels in the Western Hemisphere, including Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa Cartel; - "violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists" — he pledged to "map them at home, identify their membership" and "cripple them operationally" (see [[Antifa]], [[NSPM-7]]); - jihadist groups, and the [[Muslim Brotherhood]], newly designated a foreign terrorist organization. ProPublica, TIME and others noted what was missing: white-supremacist and far-right violence, which the previous strategy had named as the most persistent domestic threat. Critics also objected to language pledging to target "radically pro-transgender" groups. **The NCTC.** After [[Joe Kent]] resigned as director of the [[National Counterterrorism Center]] in March 2026 over the decision to go to war with Iran (see [[Iran War 2026]]), Gorka signaled in April that he wanted the job. No nomination had been reported as of this page's date. He remains a regular on the [[National Conservatism]] circuit, including NatCon Jerusalem 2026. ## Why he matters here Gorka is a clean example of the **media-to-state pipeline**: a figure whose academic credentials were widely doubted, who built his audience on [[Breitbart News]], Fox and Salem, and who now writes the federal definition of who counts as a domestic terrorist. The redefinition — cartels and the left in, the far right out — is the policy consequence of the worldview his shows sold. ## See Also - [[National Security Council]] · [[National Counterterrorism Center]] · [[Joe Kent]] - [[Antifa]] · [[NSPM-7]] · [[Domestic Terrorism]] · [[Muslim Brotherhood]] - [[Breitbart News]] · [[Steve Bannon]] - [[Salem Media Group]] · [[Salem Communications Empire]] · [[Newsmax]] - [[Hungarian History Hub]] · [[Viktor Orbán]] - [[Release the Memo]]